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you know are having thoughts suicidal thought or in crisis,
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Although certain game groups on social
media have been accused of promoting suicide, they have not
been found to have directly caused an uptick in young people
taking their own lives.

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5 facts about
russian game Blue Whale

The Blue Whale
Game | Teenage Suicide

Baldwin County Public
School System warns of "Blue Whale" self-harm game
trend

What is the Blue
Whale online suicide game?
The Blue Whale suicide game is believed to be an online
social media group which is encouraging people to kill
themselves.

There are hundreds of thousands of
posts relating to the sick trend on Instagram.

Its thought a group
administrator assigns daily tasks to members, which they
have to complete over 50 days.

The horrific tasks include
self-harming, watching horror movies and waking up at
unusual hours, but these gradually get more
extreme.

On the 50th day, the controlling
manipulators behind the game reportedly instruct the
youngsters to commit suicide.

The NSPCC say children should remember
not to follow the crowd and not feel pressured into doing
anything that makes them feel unsafe.

A spokesperson said: Children
can find it difficult to stand up to peer pressure but they
must know its perfectly okay to refuse to take part in
crazes that make them feel unsafe or scared.

Parents should talk with their
children and emphasise that they can make their own choices
and discuss ways of how to say no.

Reassuring a child that they can
still be accepted even if they dont go along with the
crowd will help stop them doing something that could hurt
them or make them uncomfortable.

Is Blue Whale in the
UK?

Essex Police informed a school in
Basildon about the Blue Whale challenge and the headteacher
wrote to parents about it.

The letter, sent by Woodlands School
in Basildon was seen by Essex Live and read: We have
discovered a game through the police that we feel you should
be aware of.

It is called The Blue Whale Game
and is played via many social media
platforms.

No deaths in Britain have been linked
to the game, but police officers have posted online warnings
to parents.

Devon and Cornwall Police PCSO Kirsty
Down tweeted: Whoever created this horrible game is
sick!

Parents: Please be aware of this
game talk to your children about it if
concerned.

How many teenage deaths have been
linked to Blue Whale in Russia?

Police are said to be probing a number
of suicides across Russia which they fear are linked to the
online craze.

But as of yet the Blue Whale game has
not been proven to be directly responsible for any
deaths.

Investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta
reported: We have counted 130 suicides of children
that took place between November 2015 to April
2016.

Almost all these children were
members of the same internet groups and lived in good, happy
families.

Two schoolgirls Yulia Konstantinova,
15, and Veronika Volkova, 16, fell to their deaths from the
roof of a 14-storey apartment block.

Another unnamed 15-year-old girl was
also critically injured after falling onto snowy ground from
a fifth floor flat in the city of Krasnoyarsk, also
Siberia.

For Kids: How to say
no

It can sometimes be hard to stand up
to your friends, so Childline offers the following tips on
how to say no:1) Say it with confidence:

Be assertive. Its your choice
and you dont have to do something which makes you feel
unsafe or uncomfortable.2) Try not to judge them:

By respecting their choices, they
should respect yours.3) Spend time with friends who can say
no:

It takes confidence and courage to say
no to your friends. Spend time with other friends who also
arent taking part.4) Suggest something else to
do:

If you dont feel comfortable
doing what your friends are doing, suggest something else to
do. Any child worried about peer pressure or online worries
can contact The National Hopeline 800-273-TALK (8255)
or Text 741741 "SOS"

Two days earlier, a 14-year-old girl
from Chita was reported to have thrown herself under a
commuter train.

A 13-year-old boy was also saved from
killing himself after he was spotted perching on the edge of
a roof in Lviv, Ukraine.

In all cases, state investigators are
probing whether the controversial social media suicide game
had influenced the girls to take their own lives.

Yulia left a note saying
End on her social media page after she posted a
picture of a big blue whale.

A family raced to stop a 15-year-old
girl from killing herself, with the young girl reportedly
now recovering in a hospital in Barcelona.

For Parents: How to talk about peer
pressure

1) Create the right situation:Make
sure you both have time to talk, the atmosphere is relaxed,
and remember that this is a conversation, not an
interrogation.

2) Listen: Avoid solely talking at
them. Listen to their concerns and their
experiences.

3) Acknowledge their worries:
Dismissing their feelings will only shut down the
conversation and make them reluctant to talk about
whats bothering them.

4) Help them practise ways of saying
no: Rehearsing with them ways to stand up to peer pressure
and coming up with alternatives for them will build their
confidence.

5) Keep the conversation going: Let
them know that they can always come to you if they have more
worries, and take an interest in how they get on saying
no.

The Siberian Times

Yulia Konstantinova, 15, joined her
friend Veronika in jumping from the roof of a 14-storey
block of flats

What are police doing to investigate
Blue Whale related deaths?

Cops are said to have launched a probe
into the sick craze sweeping Russia  the suicide
capital of the world.

It was reported that two teenage boys
were detained by police at the scene after allegedly filming
the tragic double suicide of Yulia and Veronika.

The Russian Investigative Committee
has opened a probe on incitement to suicide
regarding the pairs death.

Disturbing online game dubbed Blue
Whale has been attributed to over '130 Russian teen
suicides'

In Krasnoyarsk, law enforcement
recently opened three criminal cases of incitement to
suicide involving schoolgirls via the groups on social
media.

In all three cases, the teenagers were
rescued.

One local school director told police
he had received an anonymous call saying a student had
joined a group of death and planned soon to kill
herself.

Cops believe Veronika Volkova, 16,
fell to her death on Sunday after being manipulated by
sinister social media group

The police identified the girl who
explained that she had joined a game and had
been given tasks by the group
administrator.

She did not obey the commands, which
involved self-harm, but there are fears that others
did.

In the Chita case, transport police
confirmed the game is a possible cause of
death.

Last year, an alleged ringleader named
as 21-year-old Philipp Budeikin was detained, and he has
been charged with organising eight groups between 2013 and
2016 which promote suicide.

Some 15 teenagers committed suicide,
and another five were rescued at the last moment, according
to the case against him.

What is Instagram doing to stop the
game spreading?

Instagram has started showing users a
warning when they search for pictures relating to Blue
Whale.

When you search for the term on the
network, a notification appears which reads: Posts
with words or tags youre searching for often encourage
behaviour that can cause harm and even lead to
death.

If youre going through
something difficult, wed like to
help.

But directly underneath the post it
gives the option to see posts anyway.

There are several shocking pictures of
self-harm and even jokes about the sick game once you click
through.

Some include pools of blood on the
floor, while others appear to show a whale carved onto an
arm.

Baldwin
Schools Warning Parents of Blue Whale Self-Harm
Game
BALDWIN COUNTY, AL (WKRG)  The Baldwin County Public
School System has issued a warning to parents about a game
that encourages players to harm themselves and potentially
commit suicide.

The Blue Whale game has
reportedly reached two high schools in Baldwin County,
though officials wouldnt confirm which ones. News 5 is
told some students have come forward regarding the game,
though officials dont believe any students have harmed
themselves playing.

According to research done by Snopes,
the player signs up to follow an administrators tasks
over the course of 50 days, which can include anything from
cutting yourself to listening to a song. The player wins
when they complete the final task, committing suicide, on
the 50th day.

Peer pressure is associated with the
game through apps like Snapchat. Teenagers supposedly
tag each other and challenge them to play. The
student then downloads the Blue Whale app, which hacks into
their personal information and cannot be deleted. The app
originators then threaten the teenagers with harm to their
families or releasing of personal information until they
kill themselves.

It is my understanding that this
very dangerous game may have possibly already been
introduced

on two of our high school
campuses, reads the FYI post on the Baldwin County
Public Schools Facebook Page.

Schools in Alabama
warn parents about Blue Whale suicide game
appIt's not an urban legend, but a sick game spread over 50
days with the last task assigned by the 'master' to delete
all proof and commit suicide. Vulnerable youths are the
target of the Blue Whale Challenge.

A suicide game presented
in an app sounds like an urban legend or something from a
horror flick, but unfortunately the Blue Whale
Challenge is real. In fact, police and school
districts have issued warnings about the app and even
Instagram serves up a warning after searching for the
#bluewhalechallenge.

Vulnerable young people are the
targets for Blue Whale. Once the app is downloaded onto a
phone, it reportedly hacks the phone and harvests the
users information. In the Blue Whale Challenge, a
group administrator  also referenced as a mentor or
master  gives a young person a task to complete each
day for 50 days. If a person balks at the daily task, then
the personal information which was stolen is used as a form
of blackmail as in do this or else your private information
will be released or your family threatened. The task on the
last day is to commit suicide. This is supposedly winning
the game.

The 21-year-old Russian guy who
created the app claimed to be cleansing society
of biological waste  but well get
back to that.

Alabama, New
Zealand, UK warn parents about the Blue Whale ChallengeYesterday, Baldwin County Schools in Alabama issued a
warning to alert parents to the dangers of the Blue Whale
Challenge. It states that teenagers supposedly
tag each other on social media (Snapchat
primarily) and challenge them to play. The student then
downloads the Blue Whale app, which hacks into their
personal information and cannot be deleted. The app
originators then threaten the teenagers with harm to their
families or releasing of personal information until they
kill themselves.

WKRG claimed,
The game asks players to complete tasks, as simple as
listening to a song, as drastic as cutting

WKRG claimed, The game asks
players to complete tasks, as simple as listening to a song,
as drastic as cutting themselves or other risky
behavior. A task might be to watch a horror movie or
to wake up in the middle of the night and harm themselves.
Graphic videos on YouTube, which I wont link to,
suggest that, within a couple days, tasks jump immediately
into youths cutting themselves such as on their arm or
cutting a blue whale into their leg. The young person is to
take an image or video as proof that the task
was completed and send it to the admin of the
game.

Yesterday, police in New
Zealand
also issued a warning about Blue Whale; although its
no longer available in the Apple App Store in New Zealand,
it had been seen on Android. Waikato Police
Constable Tristan Gerritsen urged parents to delete it from
the phones of young people. He said, Without getting
into the nitty gritty, the app is particularly nasty as it
targets young people and encourages them to complete
self-harm challenges and eventually
suicide.

In April, Essex Police in the UK
warned a school about the app; in turn, Woodlands School in
Basildon sent
a letter
to parents about Blue Whale. Cambridgeshire and
Hertfordshire police have also reportedly urged parents to
keep an eye on what their kids are doing on social
media.

The Blue Whale Challenge is not always
run from an app; sometimes it is run from websites or social
media groups. Blue Whale first showed up in Russia and India
last year.

This February, the Siberian Times
reported
on several teenage girls committing suicide after being
prompted to do so via the app by their master.
Police were looking into possible ties to Blue Whale and the
investigation included the girls social media contacts
as they appeared to be in the same internet group. The
report claims there had been 130 suicides of kids between
November 2015 and April 2016. Almost all these
children were members of the same internet groups and lived
in good, happy families.

Phillip Budeikin, 21, had admitted to
being the creator of Blue Whale. He is being held on charges
of inciting at least 16 teenage girls to commit suicide.
From his sick point of view, he was cleansing
society; death group admins claim the victims were
biological waste who were happy to
die.

Budeikin has been at since 2013,
perfecting his tactics. Teenagers are told to delete all
correspondence in social accounts with the admins before
completing the last task to kill themselves.

How Blue Whale
Challenge works

Anton Breido, a senior official from
the FBI-esque Investigative Committee, told The Daily
Mail that some kids refuse to be manipulated when given
weird or boring tasks and left the group, but others
who stayed were given much stronger tasks like cutting
their veins, to balance on a roof top, to kill an animal and
post a video or pictures to prove it.

There are horrible accountings from
girls who participated in Blue Whale such as being up at
4:20 a.m. every night  which makes people so tired all
the time that making clear decisions is difficult  and
watching gory videos or videos of teens committing suicide
accompanied by haunting music and screams of
animals. The victim would watch until the admin
commanded her to stop and delete everything. To
win the game, the challenge, the young person
must commit suicide.

You may have heard about Blue Whale in
the past and thought it sounded too much like an urban
legend, but Blue Whale is real. Its not a thing of the
past just because Budeikin has been arrested; he dislikes
imitators of the sick trend he set, but they exist. The Blue
Whale Challenge is spreading to vulnerable young people in
new areas which prompted warnings from police and school
officials just yesterday.

'Blue Whale'
Game Responsible for Dozens of Suicides in Russia?
Although certain game groups on social media have been
accused of promoting suicide, they have not been found to
have directly caused an uptick in young people taking their
own lives.

Claim

The "Blue Whallt" suicide game hs been
responsible for more than 130 suicides in Russia.

Rating

Unproven

Origin

In February 2017, English-language web
sites caught wind of a purported suicide game
that had reportedly resulted in more than a hundred deaths
in Russia. The general premise of the game, which goes by
several names but is commonly referred to as the blue
whale game, is as follows:

The player signs up to play
the game and agrees to follow instructions over the
course of 50 days.

An administrator assigns a series
of tasks (anything from cutting yourself to listening to
song) that the player must accomplish.

The player wins when they complete
the final task, committing suicide, on the 50th
day.

The claim that the blue
whale suicide game (named after the way whales
sometimes beach themselves and then die) had resulted in a
wave of suicides appears to have originated with a
misinterpretation of a May 2016 story from the Russian site
Novaya Gazeta. That article reported dozens of suicides of
children in Russia during a six-month span, asserting that
some of the people who had taken their lives were part of
the same online game community on VK.com, a social media
network based out of St. Petersburg, Russia:

We counted 130 suicides of
children that occurred in Russia from November 2015 to
April 2016 (!)  Almost all of them were members of
the same group on the Internet.

Novaya Gazeta reported that at
least eighty of the suicides were linked to these
blue whale games, but an investigation by Radio
Free Europe found that no suicides had been definitively
linked to these online communities:

But while the
Russian-language Internet is groaning with profiles of
young people playing or seeking to play the game,
shocking photographs of self-injury like cutting marked
with the games hashtags, and purported links to
teen suicides, not a single death in Russia or Central
Asia has been definitively tied to Blue Whale.

Over the last six months or so,
dozens of suicides and attempted suicides in Russia,
Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan have been provisionally linked
to the game, although on closer inspection none of them
has been found to have a conclusive tie.

Furthermore, the Novaya Gazeta report
was highly criticized at the time of its publication. For
instance, the web site Meduza noted that Noyaya Gazeta
arrived at their conclusion that a social media game was
causing teenagers to commit suicide because several
teenagers from the same social media group had taken their
own lives. However, Meduza argued, it is more reasonable to
assume that depressed or suicidal teenagers are simply drawn
to the same social media groups, not that the groups were
causing them to commit suicide:

The author of the material in
the Novaya Gazeta states that the community
in the social network VKontakte bring
children to suicide. As a confirmation of this it lists
the following fact: a few dozen teenagers who committed
suicide were in groups devoted to this topic. However, to
reliably establish a causal link in this case is
impossible, and it is quite possible to assume an inverse
relationship  a teen becomes part of a group due to
the fact that it is contains people who struggle with
suicidal thoughts.

The reasons teenagers commit
suicide are well researched. According to data from the
General Prosecutors Office, in Russia 62% of
suicides among adolescents are associated with family
conflicts and general distress, conflicts with teachers,
classmates, friends, and also with the fear of violence
by adults and callousness of others. From a report on the
topic from the UN Childrens Fund (UNICEF), the
increase in the number of suicides occurs in times
of economic crisis and sharp social change. For
example, in Russia there was an increase the number of
suicides from 1987 to 1994, when the USSR collapsed. As
soon as the company adapted to its new socio-economic
conditions, the number of suicides stabilized.

Although Blue Whale
suicide groups have not been directly linked to hundreds of
suicides in Russia, the groups do apparently exist. They
originated shortly after the death of Rina Palenkova, a
Russian teenager who supposedly took her own life shortly
after posting a photograph of herself on VK.com. The image
was widely circulated on social media, and Rina soon became
the central figure of a strange cult-like group:

Social media communities such as
Sea of Whales and shock video sites shared
photographs of Rina and spread a rumor that she was part of
a suicide sect:

These groups actively
exploited the theme of suicide  continued the cult
of Rina Palenkovoy and published shock content:
psychedelic and sinister video recording suicides. The
creators of the community filled it with strange
characters  Hebrew inscriptions, numbers, codes,
pictures and video with a strange logo (it turned out to
have been borrowed from the logo of a brand of
lingerie).

Later, groups of creators began to
promote them through an interactive quest, ARG, a game
with augmented reality. They took the idea of a
mysterious quest Insider, created in 2012
 few details exist of the original project, but you
can get acquainted with its ominous promo video 
and created on that basis a new ARG with the levels and
tasks in the real world. Author of the new project
Insiders Nosferatu by Alexander refused to
communicate with Apparat. According to the testimony of
other users, the project initially had no relation to
suicide, but later it stole the
administrators of destructive groups. One of the elements
of the project was a timer on the site, counting down the
70 days prior to a certain date  according to the
F57, until the day of the mass suicides.

There is certainly reason to be
concerned about groups that venerate and promote suicide,
but the creator of the Sea of Whales community
said that he had no interest in encouraging people to take
their own lives. Rather, the groups creator says that
they created the game and the surrounding lore to drive
traffic to the page:

It took just one day,
however, for the news website Lenta.ru to get in touch
with More Kitov, the creator of the Sea of Whales
community (whales commit suicide by beaching
themselves)  yet astonishingly, he claimed that the
administrators of such groups had no interest in grooming
minors to take their own lives but were merely interested
in boosting their commercial profile.

He said that Filip Lis, the
administrator of the now-deleted community f57, just
wanted to increase the number of subscribers to attract
advertisers to his page  in Russia, the social
network VKontakte is also a popular advertising market,
and you can earn a lot of money from popular
communities.

Having come across this topic,
which was trendy with teenagers, Lis launched the myth of
the sect and used Rina Palenkova (a young
girl who reportedly committed suicide) to promote it. He
sold her cloned pages, reposts, videos and photos of her
grave as well as screenshots of her correspondence. After
VKontakte removed f57, he created similar
groups.

I looked at all the fuss, got
stunned by the hype and created my whales, More
Kitov told Lenta.ru. He insisted that his aim was to
dissuade teenagers prone to suicidal thoughts, but first
it was necessary to become one of
them.

Russia has a high baseline suicide
rate among young people. In 2013, for instance, 461 minors
took their own lives.

In May 2017, stories appeared in
English-language media about the alleged creator of the
game, who according to media reports remains detained in
Russia. Phillip Budeikin, 21, had apparently confessed to
inciting young girls to commit suicide months before
(calling them biological waste, according to
some reports) but we were only able to trace these claims
back to a November 2016 story on one site,
saint-petersburg.ru (translated):

Did you really push the
teenagers to death?

-*Firmly* Yes. I really did. Do not
worry, you will understand everything. Everyone will
understand. They were dying happy. I gave them what they
did not have in real life: warmth, understanding,
communication.

How many of them were there? Is
it really that, as a number of media outlets write, there
are 130 people in the region?

-Of course not. Investigation of
the News is just squalor. There were 17.
There were those with whom I simply communicated, whom I
knew and who later committed suicide, but without my
direct influence.

So, come on from the very
beginning. When it all started, how it was organized and
how did you get to the point of pushing people to
suicide?

-At first? There are people, but
there is a biomass. These are those who do not represent
any value to society and are or will only bring harm to
society. I cleaned our society from such people. It began
in 2013. Then I created F57 (one of the names
of death groups VKontakte
Ed. ). Just created, see what will happen. It was
stuffed with shock content, and it began to attract
people. In 2014, it was banned. For a long time I laughed
when I saw everyone trying to understand what
F57 means. Its simple. F  Philip,
my name. 57  the last digits of my then number. I
thought about the idea for five years. You can say I was
preparing. I thought through the concept of the project,
specific levels and stages. It was necessary to separate
the normal from the biomass.

This story was inexplicably picked up
months later by international tabloids (alongside claims
that the game was spreading across the world), but we remain
unable to verify any of the claims.Source: www.snopes.com/blue-whale-game-suicides-russia/